A Lovely Day to Die by Celia Fremlin

standing there, arguing, swept over me in a tidal wave of exhaustion—“Take it … There you are!” and I tipped out a second one.
    It was only after I’d got into bed, and had been lying there for several minutes trying to relax, that it occurred to me that I might be unwittingly conniving at some silly suicide gesture. Maybe the whole performance—messing noisily about in that drawer, pretending she didn’t want to wake me—had simply been a clumsy trick for getting me to reveal where the bottle was kept? Maybe I should go and check that she was all right?
    Maybe hell! I’d had enough: I was exhausted. Already I could feel sleep beginning to overtake me, wave after delicious wave …
    And then—wouldn’t you know it?—barely half an hour later the telephone rang. Dragging myself from deep sleep, I lifted the receiver and—again, wouldn’t you know it?—it wasn’t for me.
    That’s the sort of night it was, that night when Lucy came to stay.
    *
    It wasn’t until the next day that I heard the news—on the radio, at the office. All the girls heard it, though of course for them there was nothing all that special about it—this wine-importer chap, Hugo something-or-other—found dead in bed with a fractured skull.
    Busy though we were, I had to tell them I didn’t feel well and must go home immediately. I could see they were taken aback—I don’t normally let the job down like that, but what else could I do? I’d left Lucy very sound asleep when I went out in the morning, and I was desperately anxious that she shouldn’t be alone whenthe police came. There were a lot of lies I was going to have to tell, and I wanted to get them in quickly before they started trying to break down Lucy’s alibi. Yes, I was going to say, she was here in my house last night. Yes, she was sleeping heavily all the time: I had myself given her two full-strength barbiturate tablets soon after midnight, and naturally they’d knocked her out completely for hours. Yes, I’d looked into her room a couple of times during the night, just to check she was all right …
    What I didn’t tell them—and never will—was that on my first visit, to call her to the phone, I’d found the room empty, and the two blue pills lying untouched on the bedside locker; nor did I tell them that as I’d stood there, bewildered, I’d heard a car start, from a hundred yards or so down the road, the sound carrying clearly in the silence of the small hours. Above all, I didn’t tell them about the telephone call from Hugo. I never even told Lucy about it, for I realised that this call from him, between two and three in the morning, was the one thing she’d never reckoned on. The poor man was distracted, ringing round everywhere for his missing wife: and when I went to fetch her for him, and then had to come back and tell him she’d disappeared, he was more distracted than ever. Tactlessly, I suppose, and risking a crushing snub, I decided to use the occasion to put in a salutary word about this blonde typist affair, and try to make him see how miserable it was making Lucy: but far from snubbing me, or seeming angry, he was totally and genuinely bewildered. What blonde typist? What was I talking about? He and Lucy were absolutely devoted to one another, surely I knew that? He’d never looked at another woman, and never would …
    And so on and so forth. Now, I may not be married myself, but all the same I am not a complete ignoramus. I can tell when a man is speaking the truth right from his heart, and I know for certain that Hugo that night, in those last minutes before his death (as it turned out) was so speaking.
    *
    Well, the police came, and went, and I told my story. They never knew about Lucy’s absence from her bed, nor about Hugo’sphone-call, and they never will. As I said at the beginning, friendship comes high on my list of priorities. They kept on for weeks, though, looking for the blonde typist who was presumed to have wielded the